Board independence and GRI-IFC performance standards: The mediating effect of the CSR committee
By Isabel‐María García‐Sánchez, M. Gómez-Miranda, F. David, Lázaro Rodríguez‐Ariza. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2019
145 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Abstract The aim of this paper is to analyse the role played by independent directors and their decisions regarding the disclosure of information on corporate social responsibility (CSR). We posit that these directors (i) drive the creation of a CSR committee to advise them on social and environmental issues, and (ii) promote the use of the Global Reporting Initiative guidelines and the International Finance Corporation Performance Standards (jointly, the GRI-IFC strategy) in their CSR disclosure. The GRI-IFC strategy requires the disclosure of key indicators, and is expected to strengthen stakeholder engagement and to enhance the firm’s internal monitoring. Our analysis of an unbalanced sample of 750 international companies, spanning the period 2011–2016, in which logistic and ordinal regressions are applied to the panel data, reveals a generalised absence of direct involvement by independent directors in the adoption of the GRI-IFC strategy. However, in many cases these directors promote the creation of a CSR committee to advice the board on the voluntary implementation of the GRI-IFC strategy. Our evidence shows that the CSR committee plays a mediating role in the cause-effect relationship between independent directors and their adoption of the GRI-IFC strategy.
Subfields: Accounting, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/a3116f36a56326fff335345076cb6b8e8e937648
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Citations in the corpus
- CSR Committees and Their Effect on ESG Performance in UK, France, Germany, and Spain (2019, background): “This led us to think about the importance of studies that consider CSR committees as mediators [58] in the relationships between corporate governance and corporate performance.”
- Alignment Versus Monitoring: An Examination of the Effect of the CSR Committee and CSR-Linked Executive Compensation on CSR Performance (2021, background): “The main tasks of a CSR committee are to manage risks and opportunities with respect to sustainability and to fulfill obligations to stakeholders (García-Sánchez et al., 2019; Peters & Romi, 2015), which reinforce awareness of CSR concerns and promote transparency (Adams, 2002).”